With a Storyteller’s Touch, Jason Bittel Helps Complex Science Make Sense

The summer of 2007 was transformational for Jason Bittel, who spent weeks battling feral hogs in the backcountry of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

As a National Park Service intern, Bittel worked long days and occasional nights setting traps across the park’s 522,000 acres, part of a federal effort to eradicate invasive Eurasian wild hogs. The animals tear up fragile plants and gorge on native wildlife, scarring one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in North America.

The work involved steep climbs, muddy boots and careful data collection deep in the woods. Bittel was issued a pistol to take along on his forays.

“It was one of the weirdest, wildest experiences of my life,” Bittel said.

He labored alongside wildlife managers who wrangled bears, hunted hogs and responded to constant small crises in the park. Watching them, Bittel realized the job was as much about science as it was about survival and that the stories behind the work were rarely told.

“I could write a book about the wildlife department in the Smokies,” he said.

He hasn’t written that book, at least not yet. But the internship proved to be a turning point. It showed Bittel, a writer by training, that some of the most compelling stories live at the intersection of science, policy and everyday life.

Today, he tells those stories for a living.

In 2025, Bittel became associate director of research communications for Carnegie Mellon University’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, where he translates complex social science research into clear, engaging stories the rest of us can easily read.

“I am not a scientist,” Bittel said. “My training is in English and writing. My job has always been to talk to smart people, read scientific papers and translate that to the public — making the science accessible and, hopefully, a little entertaining, too.”

On the job, Bittel makes up for his lack of formal science credentials with deep curiosity and a desire to learn. As he pores over academic journals or sits in at seminars, he asks the kinds of questions a nonacademic visitor might pose.

Recently, Bittel attended a causal inference working group in the Department of Statistics & Data Science. For about an hour, a Ph. D. student presented research to a roomful of specialists.

“He was affable and enthusiastic, a good communicator,” Bittel said. “But I did not understand one sentence from the beginning to the end. I’ve never heard that many words in English without knowing what in the world we were talking about.”

So Bittel did what he does best. Before and after the talk, he chatted with the principal investigators, tugging at threads of information he could weave into a story — big-picture ideas about how researchers untangle cause and effect in everyday life.

Bittel’s job is to show how the social sciences play out in the real world. Consider, for example, the flood of data-driven analysis leading up the NFL Draft earlier this year in Pittsburgh.

“If you asked an average Steelers fan to take a data science class, they’d probably say no,” Bittel said. “But if you start showing how scientific data can help the Steelers draft better players, hey, everybody's into that.”

For Bittel, the trick is stripping away jargon and rebuilding the story in plain language without dumbing it down. He honed that skill for several years by answering science questions from 7- to 11‑year‑olds in a weekly column for The Washington Post. He also has written five science-themed children’s books.

“Most popular science material isn’t written for kids,” he said. “I was taking technical material — like explaining the tectonic plates in 300 words or fewer —and putting it into language any kid could understand.”

In his 12 years as a freelance science journalist prior to joining CMU, Bittel primarily covered animals, conservation and the stranger corners of human‑animal encounters. That work eventually crystallized into a book, “Grizzled: Love Letters to 50 of North America’s Least Understood Animals,” published in March by National Geographic.

The book, which Bittel described as a “non-traditional field guide,” features short, punchy chapters paired with illustrations. Rather than focusing on exotic species, it highlights possums, beavers, crayfish and other overlooked creatures right outside our doors.

“It's wild how little we know about the animals all around us,” he said.

When he sat down to write a sample chapter for potential publishers, Bittel didn’t pick wolves, camels or a rare jungle cat. He chose the white‑tailed deer.

“Why? Because deer are the most boring animal I could think of,” Bittel said. “If I could make deer interesting to me, I could probably make any species interesting to anyone.”

In his research, Bittel discovered that these gentle-looking animals range from Argentina to the Arctic Circle and have outlasted predators such as dire wolves and saber‑toothed cats. The chapter became something of a manifesto: No animal is boring if you tell its story well.

Other chapters explore three-foot-long salamanders guard boulders in streams in the Appalachians, and a “batnado” of millions of Mexican free‑tailed bats that poured from caves near San Antonio, Texas.

“You don't have to travel to the ends of the Earth to see crazy creatures,” Bittel said. “They're all around us. You just need to know where and how to look for them.”

Away from work, Bittel coaches youth soccer and gives talks at schools, where the kids know him as “the weird animal guy.” At CMU, faculty and students are coming to see him in a similar way: the person you call when you want people outside your field to comprehend and care about your life’s work.

“The best part about my job is I learn something new every day,” he said. “The more that that happens, the more I realize that I’m in the right place, doing the right thing.”